Elon Musk revealed his plans for SpaceX to go to Mars in September of 2016. It involves the building of the Interplanetary Transport System and he plans to launch the first humans to Mars in 2024.

NASA’s Mars plan is far more involved with investigating the problems of long-term interplanetary flight, as they plan to build space stations in ciclunar orbit over the course of 14 years, the Deep Space Gateway and the Deep Space Transport, which will become the planetary vessel they will use for the first manned mission to Mars in 2033.

NASA’s plans revolve around the new Orion capsule, which is the first manned spacecraft NASA has created since the Space Shuttle. It is meant for deep-space travel and habitation. Meanwhile, SpaceX plans to launch the manned version of their Dragon capsule, the Dragon 2, in 2018, which will open up more opportunities for the private space company.

Elon Musk revealed his plans for SpaceX to go to Mars in September of 2016. It involves the building of the Interplanetary Transport System and he plans to launch the first humans to Mars in 2024.

NASA’s Mars plan is far more involved with investigating the problems of long-term interplanetary flight, as they plan to build space stations in ciclunar orbit over the course of 14 years, the Deep Space Gateway and the Deep Space Transport, which will become the planetary vessel they will use for the first manned mission to Mars in 2033.

NASA’s plans revolve around the new Orion capsule, which is the first manned spacecraft NASA has created since the Space Shuttle. It is meant for deep-space travel and habitation. Meanwhile, SpaceX plans to launch the manned version of their Dragon capsule, the Dragon 2, in 2018, which will open up more opportunities for the private space company.

What is life? Seems like a really simple question. But it’s actually more complex than you can imagine. And the search for the answer leads to other questions and thoughts that change our very perspective of ourselves.

Jupiter is made of 90% hydrogen and 10 percent Helium and other chemicals. Its clouds include layers of ammonia ice, ammonium sulfide, and water vapor, but underneath the cloud layer, things get really weird.

The pressure forces the hydrogen together until it takes on some unique properties, first a supercritical state that is neither gas nor water, and the other a metallic hydrogen state where the flowing hydrogen conducts electricity that ultimately powers its massive magnetic field.

Jason Croft is a major advocate for entrepreneurship and the startup community. Here we talk about how we can use the advancements in technology that are on the way instead of being steamrolled by them.

A facial recognition system can identify someone even if their face is covered up.

The Disguised Face Identification (DFI) system uses an AI network to map facial points and reveal the identity of people.

It could eventually help to pick out criminals, protesters, or anyone who hides their identity by covering themselves with masks, scarves or sunglasses.

The software could also see the end of public anonymity, sparking privacy concerns from one academic, who has labelled it ‘authoritarian‘.

“This is very interesting for law enforcement and other organisations that want to capture criminals,” Amarjot Singh, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on DIF.

“The potential applications are beyond imagination.”

Led by Mr Singh, the international team of scientists published their research on the pre-print server arXiv.

DFI uses a deep-learning AI neural network that the team trained by feeding it images of people using a variety of disguises to cover their faces.

The images had a mixture of complex and simple backgrounds to challenge the AI in a variety of scenarios.

The AI identifies people by measuring the distances and angles between 14 facial points – ten for the eyes, three for the lips, and one for the nose.

It uses these readings to estimate the hidden facial structure, and then compares this with learned images to unveil the person’s true identity.

In early tests, the algorithm correctly identified people whose faces were covered by hats or scarves 56 per cent of the time.

This accuracy dropped to 43 per cent when the faces were also wearing glasses. The work is still in its early stages, and the algorithm needs to be fed more data before it can be brought into the field.

Despite these hurdles, Mr Singh told Inverse: “We’re close to implementing it practically.”

The DFI team have called on other researchers to help develop the technology using their datasets of covered and uncovered faces.

The research, which has not yet been peer reviewed and is still awaiting publication, has sparked controversy after some raised concerns over privacy rights.

Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, posted the research to Twitter, claiming that the AI is ‘authoritarian’.

He tweeted: ‘The authors claim the system works about half the time even when people wear glasses. And this is just the beginning; first paper.

“And this is maybe the third or fourth most worrying ML paper I’ve seen recently re: AI and emergent authoritarianism. Historical crossroads.”

“Yes, we can & should nitpick this and all papers but the trend is clear. Ever-increasing new capability that will serve authoritarians well.”

The DFI team will present their research at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshop in Venice, Italy, next month.

For their help with the intro to this video. This was shot as part of the YouTube NextUp program in August, at the YouTube space in New York. The set was constructed for a series on Great Big Story starring Philipe Cousteau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTvvv…

Gordon E. Moore was one of the co-founders of Intel and first proposed was came to be known as Moore’s Law, which predicted that computer power would double every 2 years.

For nearly 50 years, the industry kept pace with this prediction, but in recent years there’s been a slowdown. 2 main reasons are heat and the quantum tunneling effect that occurs at the atomic scales.

Some of the technologies that have been theorized to break through this barrier include:

Graphene processors. Graphene carries electricity far better than traditional silicon processors, but is currently very expensive to produce.

Three Dimensional Chips. Some manufacturers are experimenting with 3-D chips that combine processing and memory in one place to improve speed.

Molecular transistors. Transistors that use a single molecule to transfer electricity.

Photon transistors. These take electrons out of the process entirely and replaces them with laser beams.

Quantum computers. These long-hyped machines could perform multiple calculations at once by using the superposition of quantum particles to process information.

Protein computers. These use folding proteins to make calculations.

And finally, DNA computers. DNA is the perfect data storage device, allowing scientists to store 700 terabytes of information in only one gram. But it can also be used in logic gates and are being tested in a processing capacity.

This is the home of Answers With Joe, where I take questions and comments and deconstruct them to find the interestingness - the funny, unique, but universal truths that give you a new perspective on the world. Enter with an open mind. Leave with a blown one. New videos every Monday unless I screw up.